Heavy metal festival lays four-mile beer pipeline

A rock festival in Germany has laid a four-mile pipeline beneath its site to deliver free-flowing beer to 75,000 thirsty metalheads in August.

The 7km beer pipeline in Wacken in progress

The 7km pipeline will supply around 400,000 litres of lager to revellers at this year’s Wacken Open Air festival in Wacken, northern Germany, which is set to play host to heavy metal acts including Alice Cooper, Megadeth, Marilyn Manson and Trivium in August.

The pipeline will allow bartenders to pour six beers per second, according to organisers, eliminating the need for barrel swaps and preventing the festival grounds from being churned up by beer trucks.

Huge empty pipes have already been installed beneath the festival site, through which a beer pipeline will be run, as well as fiber optic cables and power supply lines.

“Beer stalls in front of the main stages will be provided with fresh beer from our new underground beer pipeline,” it said. “Both fresh and waste water will run through these pipes too. Of course we will control the hygiene of the tubes all the time.

“Until this year, we always had to move dozens of barrels through the infield. We had to bring in full barrels before and during the shows and afterwards we had to remove the empty ones. This caused a lot of avoidable traffic. The new pipeline helps us to protect the floor. And we also get rid of bottlenecks at the bar, you will not have to wait for the new barrel to be on tap anymore.”

Wacken’s pipeline is more than double the length of another beer pipeline project in Bruges. Last year a Belgium brewery began work to instal a 3km underground beer pipeline underneath the city of Bruges, in partnership with the Bruges City Council, to reduce the number of delivery trucks rumbling through its streets.

The pipeline is capable of transporting 1,000 gallons of beer an hour from the five-century-old De Halve Maan brewery in the city to a nearby bottling factory on the outskirts of Bruges.

The brewery raised €300,000 through crowdfunding, with the overall cost of the project reported to be around €4.5m.

The pipeline will supply around 400,000 litres of beer to festival-goers